Our Work with KKR and Carlyle Group

The private equity industry invests in thousands of companies, employs millions of people and represents about 10% of U.S. GDP. Working with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), The Carlyle Group (Carlyle) and other leading private equity firms provides EDF with a powerful lever to impact business and environmental performance at a wide range of companies across the economy.

Our Approach: Green Returns

Our Green Returns initiative is an ambitious effort to make environmental management and innovation a standard best practice across the private equity sector. We are making this a reality by teaming up with leading private equity firms to develop and implement flexible tools and resources for improving business and environmental performance across the private equity value chain.

Our work with KKR

We teamed up with KKR in 2008 to develop the firm’s industry-leading Green Portfolio Program. Focusing on the operations of existing portfolio companies, we developed a set of analytic tools and metrics to improve business and environmental performance in five key environmental performance areas.

Three of KKR's portfolio companies piloted the program in 2008 with impressive results. In 2009, five additional companies joined the program to identify opportunities to improve performance. To-date, these eight companies have saved over $160 million in operating costs and eliminated 345,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases and 1.2 million tons of waste.

Additional companies have since joined the Green Portfolio program, which now includes 20% of KKR’s global portfolio. KKR is actively working to develop resources to share best practices among portfolio companies.

Our work with Carlyle

Building on our success with the Green Portfolio Program, we are working with Carlyle to focus on the front end of the investment process. Together, we developed a pioneering environmental due diligence screen to discover new opportunities to improve operations and create value through environmental innovation prior to investment. This early-stage approach sets a new standard for the industry and expands the environmental mindset from “risks” to “opportunities.”